Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Henry Farrell and KeiranHealy are talking about Sesame Street over at Crooked Timber--and well they should: it was, in its time, probably the strongest, most mature, most intelligent and good-hearted effort ever made to fulfill the idealistic dreams of some of those early advocates of better television programming back in the 40s and 50s. Educating and enlightening and uplifting and uniting the people, through images and story-telling and song! I've always had, and always will have, a soft spot for that program, though the Sesame Street I watched and loved has been missing for decades now, as its disappeared for those Irish boys and girls who fell in love with the Muppets and America while watching the show when it was imported across the Pacific, as Henry and Keiran attest.

There are lots of fine comments on both threads (bloix and mikesdak have especially good insights), attesting to the seriousness with which Sesame Street has struggled with its ideals and strategies--for educating its youthful viewers, and enabling them to relate to others as well) as it has traveled the globe and taken root in surprising surroundings. But that doesn't surprise me, as Crooked Timber has always attracted, as part of its fairly open-minded intellectual/cosmopolitan style, authors and commenters that have understood the importance of childhood--and not in some cloying, stereotypically "liberal" way, but in a way that recognizes the hard work and real joys of figuring out how make home that parents and children can enjoy together. And originally, Sesame Street was supposed to provide that: even if children and adults didn't watch it always together (which we didn't: my parents couldn't keep up with me--back in the early 70s, before and during my kindergarten years, I would, according to my mother, catch the show two or three times a day, absorbing every cartoon and skit--and my dad, at least, wouldn't have wanted to, considering as he did the program to be "socialist," once commenting to me, rather Grouch-like, that "their garbage is collected for free"), it gave children a fairly unstructured, yet still carefully filled, glimpse of the variety and reciprocity which characterized the adult world. The children would parrot back what they learned to their parents, the volia--you've got growth and change and joy. Sometimes, anyway.

When Belle Waring weighed in on Sesame Street on Crooked Timber a few years back, it got me and Tim Burke and Laura McKenna arguing about children's television and parenting and culture, as we we tended to do a lot back then. (See here and here for examples.) On that thread, Tim pointed out that what he calls "the old prosocial expert mafia" used to hate because of it took kids away from books and prepared their eyes and minds for commercial television. I have a lot of disagreements with Tim on this and some related points (I'm much more comfortable with the idea of television being used to support "prosocial" or public interest ends, I'm much less comfortable with commercial television and pop culture in general, and I think he seriously underestimates Sesame Street's pedagogical effectiveness, at least during those mid-years of television's 50-plus-year history), but I know that practically speaking--just in terms of what we watch and like and what we like seeing our kids watch, and how much--we're mostly on the same page, and we're certainly on the same page regarding Sesame Street's decline. With the emergence of Elmo, and the discovery of his appeal to the just-past-toddler set (read: two- and three-year-olds), the possibilities of hooking into the educational and emotional paranoia of so many of the parents of children that age, and selling them a safe, linear, reliable methodology of learning and discovery, just became overwhelming. Elmo took over the show, pushing other Muppets and humans and their storylines to the side, squelching their oddities and uniqueness and histories, dumbing the whole thing down. I don't say this to run down the character of Elmo or the makers and performers behind him (as my wife discussed in reviewing Kevin "Elmo" Clash's book, Henson was heavily involved in the creation of Elmo, and a lot of his irreverence and style were there in Elmo from the beginning), but I have to say, I wish my original thought when I first became aware of Elmo had been born out: oh man, far out, they're giving us a mentally handicapped Muppet! Because that's what I thought he was: like a Muppet with Down Syndrome or something. And if I'd been right...well, who knows, Sesame Street still probably would have gone downhill, for dozens of reasons, but at least the show probably wouldn't have so quickly been sucked into an annoyingly all-purpose, self-congratulatory, toddler-Muppet world.

Oh, well. I still have my memories, and I still have my copy of the 1978 Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, back before there was Elmo, and Maria and David were still an item, and Mr. Snuffleupagus was still imaginary, and Mr. Hooper was still alive (his key role in the Christmas special's retelling of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi," with Ernie and Bert buying each other presents, is tear-jerking television at its best), and Oscar was still something more than just grumpy, but an occasionally mean and wicked prankster. And thanks to YouTube, we still have this:

Thanks for the memories, Sesame Street. Our last two kids haven't watched you at all, but I hope, if only out of nostalgia, that you'll keep on going.

3 comments:

Russell, your Dad and mine may have been cut from the same cloth, when it came to Sesame Street. My memories of Sesame Street include a skit with a goat who got mad.

In the skit, the refrain would go, "He got maaaaad! He got maaaad! He got maaaaad! (It ain't bad to get mad)"

When my father saw it, he declared it False Doctrine and switched off the television in an ironic pique: "It is *so* bad to get mad!" he exclaimed.

The other thing I remember is all the Spanish language skits, often a repeat of English skits aired just minutes before. And I recall having little or no patience for them. But, I did learn to count to ten in Spanish, and I can still remember the music...

I don't share your opinion about Elmo, who never struck me as more than a gregarious four-year-old. I've met children whose mentation was stuck on worse things than an inability to use pronouns, though my own oldest daughter outgrew that by the age of three.

And Sesame Street in the 90's was kind of fun! Slimy the worm, Oscar's friend, planning and executing a mission to the Moon launched from Sesame Street for all worm-kind, was one of the bits played out over a season's worth of shows.

Perhaps I'm just betraying one of the characteristics of having a home office in a house with two toddlers and no cable? Hmm...

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."